‘42’ returns us to Jackie Robinson’s trial by fire

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Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer

Actor Chadwick Boseman answers questions during a Q&amp;A after the screening of Boseman's new movie co-starring Harrison Ford, "42," in which he plays Jackie Robinson at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas on March 19, 2013.

The trials of Jackie Robinson have been well chronicled, his courage often commemorated.

But for a reminder of the obstacles he went up against, and how far sports and society have come since Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, you could do worse than a pivotal scene in the new movie 42, opening Friday, a few days before April 15, when all major-leaguers will wear Robinson’s No. 42.

Robinson, played with fully realized, complex humanity by relative newcomer Chadwick Boseman, strides to the plate at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ home park, Ebbets Field, in the fifth game of his big-league career. Before he can take a swing, Phillies manager Ben Chapman, a native Alabamian played by Plano’s Alan Tudyk, starts riding him with a torrent of racial epithets that keeps going. And going. And going.

Discomfort builds. The movie audience squirms. You can only imagine the emotions felt by Robinson, under strict orders from team president Branch Rickey to keep his anger in check.

“It was a difficult scene to film because you had to bridge the time gap,” Boseman says during a recent stop in Dallas. “If somebody started doing that now, everybody would respond to it. If that happened at a Rangers game, it would be like, get this guy out of here now.”

In 1938, nine years before Robinson was called up from the Montreal Royals, Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith predicted that the first black major-leaguer would have to be a “martyr to the cause.” This is the Robinson that Boseman and writer-director Brian Helgeland give us in 42: a confident and accomplished young man who knew he’d have to take his lumps but decided it was worth it.

To Boseman’s credit, he allows Robinson’s swagger to show on the field, and his rage to explode off it. (After that first at-bat against the Phillies, he heads into a stadium tunnel and demolishes a bat.)

The orders from Rickey, played by a flagrantly gruff Harrison Ford, were simple if daunting: Don’t respond to the jibes, taunts and bean balls. Turn the other cheek for the first couple of years, lest the baseball establishment claim Robinson and his race aren’t up to the task. Once the probationary period passes, feel free to let the spikes fly high.

42 doesn’t give us the pleasure of that retribution, though you can catch a glimpse of it in Ken Burns’ Baseball. In that landmark documentary series, longtime Dodgers announcer Vin Scully remarks that Robinson was the only player he ever saw who played better the angrier he got.

As for the Chapman incident, which in real life was far worse than depicted in 42, here’s the real Robinson as quoted in Jules Tygiel’s first-rate book Baseball’s Great Experiment:

“I have to admit that this day of all the unpleasant days in my life brought me nearer to cracking up than I have ever been. For one wild and rage-crazed minute I thought, ‘To hell with Mr. Rickey’s “noble experiment.”’” The ordeal tempted Robinson to “stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white [expletives] and smash his teeth with my despised black fist.”

Sixty-five years later, shooting the scene at Engel Stadium in Chattanooga, Tenn., Boseman got some sense of what it was like to walk in Robinson’s cleats that day. And he wasn’t the only one on the set to feel a little queasy: None of the extras in the crowd knew the scene was on that day’s shooting schedule.

“There was this awkward moment of them not being able to do anything,” Boseman says. “If you’re black, you can’t do anything. If you’re white, you can’t do anything. It’s part of the story. The context of the crowd not knowing made it hit home a little more. With the repetition of it, after you hear it for a while, you start to get in this zone with it and you start to take the insult for real.”

Then the scene ended. Boseman prepared to shoot the next one. As an actor, he had the luxury of leaving the rage behind. At the eye of the storm, Robinson never did.

Follow Chris Vognar on Twitter at @chrisvognar.

Plan your life

42 screens as part of the Dallas International Film Festival at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Cinemark West Plano. It opens in theaters Friday.

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